A little known programme offered by Boeing since October 2010 called InFlight Optimization Services offers airlines the ability to get up-to-date, en route weather and wind information that is more detailed than that offered by one’s own airline in order to reduce fuel consumption.

The programme is so new that only five airlines have subscribed to the service so far. Only two, Alaska Airlines and KLM, have authorised disclosure. Three are for Winds Updates and two for Direct Routes services.

The services are not limited to airlines operating exclusively Boeing aircraft. Alaska flies only Boeing 737s but KLM operates a mixed fleet of Airbuses and Boeings. While Direct Routes is available to any aircraft equipment with ACARS, the Winds Update currently is offered only to Airbus and Boeing aircraft, said Derek Gefroh, programme manager of InFlight. Emrbaer and Bombardier aircraft could come later.

Part of the emphasis on Airbus and Boeing aircraft revolves around the stage length operated. The longer the length, the more the benefit. Short block times typically have recent wind forecasts while the longer the block time, the older the forecast, particularly on overseas flights.

Airlines also want total fleet solutions, hence Boeing’s offering the service on Airbus and Boeing aircraft.

InFlight is designed to maximise fuel and flight efficiency through continuous real-time air, traffic, weather and aircraft data to find post-departure opportunities to reduce flight time and fuel costs. Boeing monitors the flight and sends real-time updates to the flight deck or the airline’s operations centre.

According to Boeing, citing studies, operations generally use about 10% more fuel than necessary. While KLM said the savings is as little as 0.1% per flight, cumulatively over a fleet and the course of a year, the savings can be significant.

The wind updates are, for now, focused on descent operations rather than en route winds. The wind updates combine with continuous descent and RNP (Required Navigation Procedure) to shave the time off the descents.

Gefroh said that wind data could be as much as 12 hours old when pilots prepare their flight plans. Real-time, en route information permits real-time adjustments as pilots prepare to descend from cruising altitude, typically about 20 minutes from landing.

As for direct routes, airlines for years have worked with Air Traffic Control to bypass waypoints under what is called a “Direct to” system. But Gefroh said that sometimes adverse winds could actually add time to a direct routing.

“For medium size operator, like an Alaska or one a bit larger, direct routes can provide them 40,000 minutes of annual flight time saved,” said Gefroh. This equates to 300 fuel-free flights per year. “The question is, how valuable is a minute?” Boeing estimates this at $25 for regional, $125 for a very large carrier or cargo airline, $50 minute for a carrier like Southwest Airlines and $100 for a US legacy airline.

These efforts are an outgrowth of a five-year research-and-development programme by Boeing to find efficiencies in the Air Traffic Management system. But improving ATM is a federal and international effort. The US plan, NextGen, could be as much as 20 years to fully implement. Airlines need savings now.

Update, Dec. 21: Flightblogger published this report that shows a PIANO analysis of the CS100 vs A318 on the London City to New York route. Among other things, it shows a fuel burn reduction of 22.5%.

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Reuters just reported that a new airline, Odyssey of Europe, is an undisclosed customer for Bombardier’s CSeries and that the carrier plans to operate from London City Airport in competition with British Airways on some routes.

The CS100, in a reduced business class configuration, can fly from London City to New York non-stop while BA’s A318 in business class has to make a refueling stop.

BBD did not confirm the Reuters report’s customer identification, but we have been hearing this name since BBD announced an unidentified customer at the Paris Air Show.

Of course, a start-up airline competing again the power, deep pocked and frequent flier program of BA will be challenging, at least. But this does demonstrate the capabilities of the CS100 out of the highly restricted London City Airport.

737 MAX: Boeing has ann0unced the prices for the MAX and Reuters has this story comparing the competition with NEO:

Airplane Families

2011 $ in Millions Average

737 Family

737-600

59.4

737-700

70.9

737-800

84.4

737-900ER

89.6

737 MAX 7

77.7 (+6.8)

737 MAX 8

95.2 (+10.8)

737 MAX 9

101.7 (+12.1)

747 Family

747-8

332.9

747-8 Freighter

333.5

767 Family

767-200ER

151.5

767-300ER

173.1

767-300 Freighter

175.4

767-400ER

190.2

777 Family

777-200ER

244.7

777-200LR

275.8

777-300ER

298.3

777 Freighter

280.1

787 Family

787-8

193.5

787-9

227.8

What’s interesting of the MAX prices vs NG is the price premium of up to $12m, nearly twice that announced by Airbus for the NEO. Recall, too, that Boeing dissed the Airbus plans to charge a premium for the NEO; Boeing used the NEO premium as a talking point to promote the value proposition of the 737NG.

Boeing: Jim Albaugh, appearing at a Reuters event, says Boeing expects to begin converting the 948 commitments to firm orders very soon. Who are the commitments? Only four are announced out of 13 customers.

We’ve listed most of them before. We now understand that there are five top lessors who have committed (only one has announced). We’ve previously identified GECAS (no surprise here). We knew of another but did not have the name. ILFC, ALC and CIT are obvious candidates but we don’t have definitive information that these are the others.

Announced firm order

Southwest Airlines

Announced commitments

American

Lionair*

Aviation Capital Group

Lionair says theirs is more than a commitment while at the same time saying it won’t be “firmed” until January. The announcement was in November and it is not on the Boeing order list yet.

Unannounced but we’re comfortable these have committed:

GECAS

Three other lessors

COPA

GOL

Norwegian Air Shuttle

That’s 11 of the 13. We have heard the names of the other two but aren’t sure enough of them to publish them.

Bombardier: Pierre Beaudoin, president of the Canadian manufacturer, gave an interview to the Montreal Gazette on the challenges facing the company on the new CSeries. Hints of a six month delay are becoming more frequent.

Southwest Airlines: For those still wondering, it’s now official: Boeing and Southwest agreed to transfer AirTran’s outstanding order for 53 737s to Southwest, according to an SEC filing. Southwest also canceled purchase rights of its own for 20 737s as part of the order for 58 737-800s announced at the same time the MAX order was announced.

Softening Freighter Market: In another worrying sign about the global economy, Cathy Pacific has deferred to Boeing 747-8Fs to 2013 from 2012, according to AirWise. Global cargo demand is often a leading indicator of passenger demand.

Embraerforecasts a “crisis” in the Brazilian economy next year but an increase in commercial aircraft sales nonetheless.

Here is an article we did yesterday for Flightglobal Pro’s subscription service.

The Southwest Airlines order on 13 December launching the 737 Max programme is a launch of the -8 version. The carrier, which has substitution rights between the -7 and the -8, has chosen to bypass the -7 for now.

Brian Hirshman, SVP Technical Operations, told Flightglobal Pro on 15 December that the carrier is up-gauging its fleet, which it began doing this year with acquisition of the 737-800 for the first time. Southwest, throughout its history since is 1971 birth, has relied on the 737-200/300/500/700, preferring smaller sized aircraft and high frequency as its business model.

Busted. We’re a big fan of the Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters. In the warped sense of humor department, we found this to be pretty amusing, since nobody got hurt.

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TSA: Anyone who has flown in the US knows that the airport experience is probably the worst part of traveling. It’s worse than the abominable on-board service now provided by most US airlines. It’s worse than the crowded airplanes and the cramped legroom. TSA’s use of body x-ray machines is invasive. The 3-1-1 rule about liquids is absurd and the requirement to remove shoes before going through magnometers is silly.

In Europe, the body x-ray machines we’ve been through (and we had no choice for an alternative method) are less objectionable. The particular machine at Delta’s Amsterdam connecting gate was a stick figure, not an x-ray of the body itself. The stick figure shows dots where “something” appears and the security person did a quick pat-down of these locations. Much less invasive than the TSA. And the shoes stayed on. This actually was the first body scanner we went through since they were introduced and because it was a stick figure, we had no objection.

Business Week has this article talking about the TSA and its silly policies.

Boeing spent billions designing the 787 (we’re thinking only of the standard expense here, not the overruns) to dramatically improve the passenger experience, and it did a very good job. And Boeing is spending lots of money to aid airlines in training, to reduce in-flight fuel expenses and to improve the air traffic management systems.

Too bad it can’t control what the airlines do with the interior, but even that isn’t the real challenge: it’s the airport experience.

Frontier Airlines: At the Paris Air Show, Republic Airways Holdings ordered 80 A319/320neos with CFM LEAP engines, and the order was touted as the death knell by some for the Bombardier CSeries–also ordered by Republic for Frontier (40+40). As we wrote at the time, the Airbus/CFM deal was clearly a financial bail out for Frontier, which leased Airbuses from GECAS and had maintenance agreements with CFM. The leases and maintenance agreements were restructured for the ailing airline, and Airbus agreed to contribute a modest amount of cash to the airline.

We were of the opinion then–and are more convinced now–that Frontier won’t survive t0 take delivery of either the Airbus or Bombardier orders. It’s squeezed between United and Southwest airlines at Denver and between Southwest and Delta at Milwaukee. This article in the Denver Post neatly summarizes the current situation.

Will Frontier’s likely demise kill off the CSeries? Not hardly. We would be willing to bet BBD is double-booking these order positions. Doing so against weak airline orders is common practice among the OEMs.

A320 Sharklet: Jon Ostrower has a detailed piece about the wing work needed to retrofit the A320 with sharklets and some thoughts about what this means for the neo.

Dubai Air Show: The Center for Asia-Pacific Aerospace (CAPA) does an analysis on the orders placed at the Dubai Air Show and what these mean. CAPA has a couple more links within the article that are worth clicking. One link is about Bombardier and its CSeries progress.

Middle East: More on the region: Bloomberg has this report in which Emirates Airlines is considered a safer investment than the sovereign risk of Dubai.

Long term strategies at Boeing and Airbus for long haul aircraft need a special focus on Middle East airlines. We see growth at the big three Middle Eastern airlines (Emirates, Qatar, Etihad) as a trend that will not end any time soon and will come heavily at the expense of European and Asia-Pacific airlines (e.g. Lufthansa, Air France, British Airways, Thai, Singapore, Qantas). The big three airlines are all now among the fifteen largest long haul airlines in the world in terms of widebody fleet plus backlog (Emirates is the world’s largest and Qatar the third). Compared to other regions, the Middle East is an outlier in that planned fleet growth is much larger than could be justified by the region’s GDP growth alone. But, this fleet growth is all about acting as a “sixth freedom” hub for long haul traffic, particularly connecting the Asia-Pacific region with Europe and Africa.

Pratt & Whitney: Time magazine named the GTF one of the top 50 inventions in 2011. The Montreal Gazette has this take on the Time honor. (We’d link directly to Time’s article, but it is for paid subscribers only at this point.)

Boeing Wichita: News broke last week that Boeing is studying closing its Wichita operation, which is dedicated to military business. With the defense budget under attack, Boeing is finding it hard-pressed to keep Wichita open, according to news reports. The news sent Kansas politicians scurrying and set off some irate comments because Boeing promised Kansas 7,500 jobs in the KC-X tanker competition if it won (as it did). The politicians say Boeing promised Wichita the tanker finishing business and it better keep its promise. The Wichita Eagle has this latest article, which also has some interesting history of Wichita’s role in aerospace.

KC-46A Tanker: Speaking of the tanker, DOD Buzz and Bloomberg News have reports that Boeing is likely to lose money on its initial contract with the tanker. This is not particularly new; this was first reported earlier this year. But the amount has grown from a $300m loss to $500m on a $4.8bn contract.

A380 cost: Flight Global reports that Air France–a launch customer of the Airbus A380–just concluded a lease deal for one of the giant airplanes for a rental of $1.8m per month.

For an airline of Air France’s credit, lease rates are typically on the 0.80% range and sometimes as low as 0.72%. This, then, infers a purchase price of $216m-$230.4m.

American Airlines: It was announced Monday AA split its engine order between CFM (for the Airbus A319) and IAE (for the A321). Given American’s large CFM-powered Boeing 737 fleet, some might think CFM should have won the entire engine deal. But the IAE V2500 is viewed as the better engine for the larger A321–more thrust and lower fuel burn–and American follows Lufthansa Airlines in splitting the engines for the smaller and larger Airbus family.

Aviation Week has an article that provides some other interesting information about the leases for the Airbuses.

Pratt & Whitney: Does the American deal mean PW has a good change of placing the GTF on the A320neo order by American? PW’s buyout of the Rolls-Royce share of IAE certainly gives PW the ability to do a “global” deal involving V2500 and GTF engines, something CFM has been able to do for CFM56 and LEAP engines from inception. While Rolls-Royce was involved in IAE, there was no incentive for RR to be flexible on V2500 sales that might lead to GTF transactions. Now PW can wheel and deal all it wants.

War on Boeing? Aviation Week has a speculative piece that US airlines have declared “war on Boeing.” This think-piece relates to the Air Transport Association suing the US Export-Import Bank over plans to finance 787s ordered by Air India, a financial and management basket-case.

While AvWeek raises some interesting points, we’re told this has more to do with a dispute between Delta Air Lines–instigator of the ATA action–and India. We think Boeing is merely getting mugged in the process and that this is not a “war on Boeing.”

Turboprops: Jets always draw the most attention but Aspire Aviation has a long piece about turboprops, specifically the Q400 vs the ATR series, that merits reading. Turboprops are slowly regaining favor in some quarters.

The Beauty of it: From Randy Tinseth’s blog, here is a photo that is just a beauty, from the Dubai Air Show:

Boeing 737 MAX: Note the wording in the Boeing press release about Aviation Capital Group’s commitment for the MAX: “ACG first leasing company to announce commitment for 737 MAX.” Not that ACG is the first lessor to commit; it is the first leasing company to announce its commitment. We understand two other lessors have committed. One is GECAS (no surprise, given the family-engine connection). We haven’t identified the other one with enough confidence to publish its name yet.

Bombardier: There remain three unidentified orders announced by BBD: one in Europe, two in the Middle East. The Middle Eastern ones should be revealed at the Bahrain Air Show. (This probably gives you a hint who they are and why they weren’t revealed at the rival Dubai show.)

Also, with some aerospace analysts increasingly speculating the CSeries entry-into-service will slip to 2014 (and, for the moment, BBD says ’tain’t so), we’ll remind everyone that the AirInsight CSeries Business Case report of December 2010 assumed a 2014 EIS.

Embraer: EMB has teamed with Alcoa to offerer advanced metals on the E-Jet RE, to lighten weights and reduce maintenance. EMB isn’t using composites (BBD’s CSeries has an aluminum-lithium fuselage and composite wings), but the E-Jets at 2×2 seating and 2,000 mile range are lighter than the CS-100 with which they will compete. Ninety percent of the US domestic flying is less than 2,000 miles (other areas of the world are likewise), so the operating costs vs the 2×3 seating, heavier CS100 will be interesting to watch.

YouTube: We’ve added a YouTube category in the right hand column, with links to OEM You Tube channels. So far we have Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier Aerospace, CFM and Embraer. As we find more, we’ll add them.

We took a bye on daily coverage because we weren’t there and the on-site reporters could do better than we could from afar. So we decided to do a post-show pontification.

Overview

Airbus and Boeing dominated the headline–no surprise there–but while Boeing had a blow-out order with 50+20 777-300ERs from Emirates Airlines, Airbus had another mind-xxxx from the mercurial Akbar “U-Turn” Al-Baker, CEO of Qatar Airways. Al-Baker is now the subject of a mocking Twitter account, @AkbarAlFaker, having a conversation with @MichaelOhReally.